My wife and I are decidedly childfree. I have never wanted kids, and she has come around to this over time. I got a snip snip, so we wont be having kids.

Anyway, we gave our friends with a 2 year old a night "out" as a present. We got them dinner at her favorite restaurant. And said we would babysit.

They dropped their kid, who is pretty well behaved and was well behaved most of the night. After about 30 mins, the wife said, how long are we doing this again? After about an hour and half, she left me with the kid as he was bathing (he loves bathtime), as she couldn't handle it anymore.

Up to this point, he was well behaved and cute but mildly annoying. Well his parents show up after a little over two hours, and he suddenly turns into a holy terror. Screaming, crying, etc. They just ignored him while we had a cocktail. And apologized for his freak out.

Then they left, and the wife said - I am so glad we don't have kids. It wasn't that it was that bad, it wasn't. But it was the kid turned into a decent kid to a holy terror almost immediately as his parents turned up. And my thought, that is the kid they have to deal with every night. Yikes.

I babysat once when I was 15. It was one of three times total babysitting for other than family. The two kids I was watching this time were running all over the place before the parents left - a girl (11) and a boy (7). While the parents are telling me the emergency info, the boy climbs to the top of a 7ft cabinet and leaps off it onto the couch. The mother says NOTHING. Five minutes after the parents leave the boy picks up their cat. Then, the girls scream, "Don't! You'll kill him like you did the other one!!" At that point I became a BIG fan of using birth control.

holy shit O_o ..my cousin threw a kitten down the stairs once when she was little (maybe 5 years old), but that did NOT go unpunished. The kitten was fine, although a little bewildered, but my cousin got yelled at for almost half an hour (my uncle gets REALLY angry when it comes to animal abuse) and then she got grounded for like a month.. suffice it to say she never did that again. Also, she didn't get to keep the kitten.

It's true they don't know any better, but that's the whole point of parenting them. It's the parents' job to teach the kid better, so they don't end up strangling the poor cat or getting bitten in the face.

My son pulled my sister's dog's tail last week and got a nice nip on the cheek in return. I scolded him and explained to him to be gentle or don't touch. It pisses me off when people get rid of their pets simply because that's easier than teaching their child not to be an asshole to animals.

Indeed! he's a really good guy and won't tolerate any abuse or ignorance of any kind. He has a lot of good stories about it too. He's over 2m tall and has served as a soldier in the UN. Walking home at night he stopped a guy who was trying to beat up his gf, and another night he scared the shit out of a gang of guys who were harassing some tween girls on the subway. He's definitely one of my favorite people :)

I babysat a my full time after school job in Highschool. I started at 12 with partial supervision and by 14 was on my own. Most of the kids in my neighborhood were watched by me. When I joined the Navy at 18 all of my fellow "adult" female sailors started popping out kids left and right. I watched one new born and said,"Oh HELL no." Now at 36, I utterly refuse to watch anyone's kids. I do not give a damn who they are. I will not watch their damn kids longer than it takes them to use the bathroom. Luckily, this is common knowledge amongst my friends so they no longer even hint about it.

I used to babysit 4 children who were amazing. Listened well, could sit and watch a movie and went to sleep with minimal trouble. The youngest (I watched him from 18 months to 3.5 years) would sometimes resist sleeping and once the 6 year old cut his own hair when I thought he was in the bathroom.
Even the best kids have those days.

Agreed. My boss has two well-behaved children that I really do like, but when it's the end of the day at the office and they show up - screaming and with boundless amounts of energy - I am SO GLAD I can get away from them. And go home to my quiet house.

Seeing how run-down he is and how alslgkagskag they are is the best kind of birth control.

Agreed. I was kind of ambivalent about having kids throughout high school and college, and my husband was the same. "Maybe we'll have some one day, but it's not a goal or anything."

Then I spent six months as a nanny, starting when the kid was about 2 months old. He wasn't even a difficult baby, but it made me violently opposed to the idea of having any of our own. I'll stick with being the cool aunt, and then I can sugar them up and send them home to their parents to fight about bedtime. :-)

I like babysitting, but I only babysit, well, babies. I can't stand little kids. I would rather change a dirty diaper than deal with a four year old asking five hundred questions in the span of two hours. Ugh. It's not pregnancy or babies that has diverted me from wanting children, it's having to deal with ages 2 through 12 that I know I could never handle.

I babysat from the age of 12 up until i was about 18/19 then again last winter when I was 23. I firmly believe that the reason I don't want kids is because I was a babysitter. I being the local "go-to" babysitter I had the privilege (being super sarcastic) of watching devil children ALL the time. Nope not for me. I'll gladly go into someone's home and watch their children for a few hours but I ALWAYS want to go home to a childfree home.

That's the difference. It's like when you have a relationship as a kid. It's one thing to date someone and see them at school, but when you have to spend every day with someone, when you have to put up with everything they do, it's not the same.

The kids you see around outside, the ones you see when baby sitting, at your workplace, they're just the beginning of what happens at home.

You know that obnoxious bit parents do when they absolutely ignore their children yelling at the top of their lungs.

Sometimes when I go up to my boss with crazy fucking ideas and she is busy she does that to me, and says "Yes email me about and how much it will cost" but that is really her just ignoring me as I always have to make my point again in person